Page 60 of The Producer: Aaron

I continue my slow dance, taking the time to savor our bodies tightened in a grip that blends skins, hearts, and souls. I savor his trembling, whispered groan as he pursues his pleasure until he explodes, holding his breath. Only in this moment do I allow myself to reach my pleasure, riding the wave that overwhelms me and makes me short of breath.

Aaron and I are good at fucking, at venting those instincts that make us feel alive, but we are even better at connecting in a way that goes beyond the physical, beyond the mind. We are good atmerging and becoming one person, and not even his father can take that away from us.

I never thought of killing someone. The idea is so far from my person that the mere thought of harming a human being disturbs me. Yet, I wish my father would die. I spent the night thinking about how much of a liberation it would be if I walked into his office and choked the life out of him.

My father is a bad person in every way. There is nothing that can be saved. I thought about our childhoods, mine and my brother Evan’s. There is no memory of my father that is happy. Not a single day where I admired him for something. I always feared him until I learned what he wanted and followed his choices. They weren’t that bad. My father never wanted to see me fail, even though he always tells me I’m a failure. I reflect his image in the eyes of the public. If I fail, he fails with me.

I enter his office without knocking, and the surprise painted on his face almost pleases me. But when it turns into a grin, the anger that has been smoldering since last night boils in my veins like magma ready to explode. I’ve always kept my eyes fixed on the final prize, on this company I will one day run in his place, but even that goal is clouded by a wave of anger that I can’t contain.

“Stay away from her,” I hiss, resting my hands on his desk.

My father crosses his arms, leans against the back of his damn throne, and looks at me with a grin I would like to tear away with my own hands. I can almost physically feel the skin of his face ripping under my nails as I tear it off. It’s such a visceral feeling that it almost scares me. I have never been so violent, not even inmy bloodiest fantasies, toward this man.

“Or what? What would you do?”

“I’ve told you this once. Stay away from her, or I swear you lose me this time, too.”

I see him hesitate for a moment. A single moment in which his façade is not perfect, a single moment of indecision that appears on his face but that I see clear as day and provides me with the necessary calm for my threats.

“If you think she is worth all this trouble, you’re dumber than I thought. How long do you think it will take before she leaves you?”

The fury inside me explodes and I’m unable to control it. I grab him by the tie, pull him to me, and punch him in the face. Only once, because I refuse to get my hands dirty for someone like him. When he looks at me again, anger shines through the expression he can’t hide. The mask has fallen, and it will take a while before it returns to its place. The barely swollen lip is the only evidence of my assault. I don’t care if someone sees I beat him. A punch is enough to make him understand how serious my threat is. I have never put my hands on anyone, and this event is serious precisely because it is isolated.

“If you dare approach her again, I swear I will not stop at one punch next time. But more importantly, if you dare do anything to her or those close to her, I will bring down your entire empire, even at the cost of dismantling it one brick at a time. I will leave you in shit so deep you can’t breathe. I will work for the competition, and remember that I know many things about this company,” I whisper in his ear before getting up and letting go of his tie.

He no longer has that smug smile on his lips, and although he has managed to contain his anger, his gloomy expressiontells me everything there is to know about our meeting. He understands that I am serious, and I think it’s the first time since I’ve worked with him that he’s really taken what I say seriously. The irony is that it’s about a woman and not the job I’ve been sweating over since I was eighteen.

“Is that a threat?” His tone is a mixture of severity and concern.

“It’s a promise,” I say before I open the door and slam it behind me. The secretary, who couldn’t stop me a few moments before I walked into his office, looks at me with wide eyes as I untie my tie and walk away furiously.

When I arrive in my office and sit behind my desk, I look at my hands and notice the tremor. It’s not anger that makes them so unstable, but the realization that I’ve just challenged my father like I’ve never done before, seriously jeopardizing everything I’ve worked for.

“Are you okay?” Tracy’s worried voice gets my attention.

I look up and find her leaning against the closed door. She has an expression of concern on her face. I’ve never heard her so somber since I hired her, and this shakes me more than the fist I just threw, more than the threats that came out of my lips a few minutes ago.

“I don’t know,” I admit, looking down at my hands that show no sign of stopping their shaking.

***

The glass in front of me is a bit blurred like the rest of the club around me. After confessing to Tracy that I was not well, I took refuge at the Hunting Club in the middle of the working day. Never once since I was twenty years old have I missed a day of work, often also using Saturdays and Sundays to find new ideas and do what I like with all the passion I can put into it. SinceDakota came into my life, I have often found myself in this place at the most ungodly of hours, leaving my office empty.

There aren’t many people around, no one I want to talk to, so glass after glass, my vision blurs, but my mind doesn’t. It keeps thinking about what happened with my father and how tight he keeps my leash.

I’ve lived my life with blinders, focused on the ultimate goal–my father’s company–ignoring everything else. I sacrificed everything for it and today felt it wobble under my feet while I was punching the one who holds the reins. It was like walking inside the mouth of a volcano, hoping not to burn.

In all these years, following the rules has never been a problem. I put a smile on my face to be able to get what I want, even if, in the meantime, I have to swallow my pride and my ideas. As long as I have to think only for myself, the situation is bearable. I tell myself that when my father retires, I will decide where to lead the company because, at that point, it will be mine, and no one can take it away from me. But Dakota barged in, turning the life I built upside down with so much effort, and I can no longer ignore the fact that what I did today undermined my relationship with my father. With him, it has always been a tug-of-war, a test of strength where I have always let him win. Today I crossed a line, and I can’t go back.

“I thought you were a workaholic, but I see you are here to slack off.” Dakota’s sweet voice seems almost like a hallucination.

I’ve thought about her so often during the day that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was just the figment of my foggy brain. So when I turn to her and find her next to me, I have to squint a couple of times to focus, but ultimately give it up.

“How did you get in?” It’s not the first thing I should ask her. I should ask her what she’s doing here, how she found me, andwhy she’s not at work, but my brain, clouded by alcohol, seems to have decided on this path.

“They made an exception when I told them I had to pick you up. They called Gaspard while he was taking me home,” she explains, and things make more sense.

The Club doesn’t want problems with drunk people, so when they realized that I’d been sitting at this counter for hours, they called the emergency number I gave them when I signed up for the membership. The fact that I have my driver as an emergency contact says a lot about how lonely my life is.

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